5 10 Obnoxious Right-Wing Moralists Who Were Caught With Their Pants Down

The most strident and sanctimonious moralists in the U.S. turn out to be total hypocrites.

Time and time again, the most strident and sanctimonious
moralists in the U.S. turn out to be total hypocrites. Far-right
television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart screamed about the evils of
adultery and fornication while he was cheating on his wife with
prostitutes in the late 1980s; evangelist/cult leader Tony Alamo had
spent decades preaching fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism when, in 2009,
he was sentenced to www.nydailynews.com/news/national/evangelist-tony-alamo-175-
for a long list of sexual abuse charges involving underage girls. And
while there are countless priests, nuns, ministers and rabbis who
quietly practice what they preach, it is often the pompous moralists who
get caught up in sex scandals.Here are 10 self-appointed guardians of morality who turned out to be major hypocrites.

1. Christian patriarchy promoter Bill Gothard

Bill Gothard, the 80-year-old Christian fundamentalist who founded the
Institute in Basic Life Principles back in 1973, is considered extreme
even among the Christian Right. Not only is he anti-gay and
anti-abortion, but he considers all rock music demonic (including
Christian rock), opposes all forms of contraception (even the Catholic
rhythm method) and believes that wives should be totally submissive to
their husbands and never work outside the home. Gothard has been one of
the top proponents of homeschooling and an influential figure in the
Quiverfull, or "Christian patriarchy" movement. But in 2014, Gothard www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/conservative-leader
as president of IBLP after a major sex scandal: more than 30 women
alleged that he sexually harassed them, and one alleged that he molested
her when she was only 16.

2. The Rev. George Alan Rekers

Far-right Christian fundamentalist George Alan Rekers has a long history of
anti-gay activism. He was part of the Family Research Council when the
Rev. James Dobson founded that group in 1983, and he spent many years as
a so-called “scientific advisor” for the National Association for
Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, or NARTH, an organization
specializing in bogus “restorative therapy” or “conversion therapy” for
gay men. Rekers testified in court many times about how “destructive”
and immoral he considered the "gay lifestyle” to be and claimed to offer
scientific evidence that gay men could be converted to heterosexuality.
But in 2010, Rekers (who was married with children) showed his
hypocrisy when he used Rentboy.com, a gay website specializing in male
escorts, to find a www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/08/rekers.sissy.boy.experiment/ for a 10-day visit to Europe. The escort told the Miami New Timesthat he had sex with Rekers during the trip, and Rekers www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/08/rekers.sissy.boy.experiment/ because of the scandal.

3. Doug W. Phillips, founder of Vision Forum Ministries

One of the Christian fundamentalists Gothard influenced was Doug W.
Phillips, who became quite influential himself after founding the San
Antonio, Texas-based Vision Forum Ministries in 1998. Phillips has been
one of the leading proponents of Quiverfull/Christian patriarchy
ideology, teaching that all birth control is sinful and that wives must
obey their husbands at all times. In 2013, Phillips resigned from Vision
Forum after admitting he had cheated on his wife. But according to a
Texas woman named Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, who he employed as a live-in
nanny, Phillips was more than an adulterer; in a civil lawsuit filed in
2014, Torres-Manteufel alleged that Phillips sexually www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/04/16/douglas_phillips_la her repeatedly, despite her pleas for him www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-leader-sued-s.

4. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich is a shining example of the old saying, there are none so pure
as those who have sinned. When Gingrich was serving as speaker of the
House of Representatives in 1998, he hounded President Bill Clinton with
a vengeance because of his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. Problem:
Gingrich himself had a long history of adultery. He had cheated on his
first wife, Jackie Battley, in the early 1980s, and when he was
demanding Clinton’s impeachment, Gingrich was cheating on his second
wife, Marianne Ginther. But despite all that blatant hypocrisy, Gingrich
has maintained a friendly relationship with the Christian Right and had
no problem seeking the evangelical vote when he ran for president in
the GOP primary in 2012.

5. Steve Wiles, a.k.a. Miss Mona Sinclair

When Steve Wiles ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the North
Carolina State Senate in 2014, he campaigned passionately against gay
marriage in that state. But it turned out that Wiles had been a www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/05/05/nc_republican_steve_w,
where he went by the stage name Miss Mona Sinclair. On top of that,
Wiles had been a promoter in the Miss Gay America drag pageant. But that
was before he decided to pursue the anti-gay vote in North Carolina.
Wiles’ hypocrisy didn’t endear him to primary voters, and he lost to
incumbent Joyce R. Krawiec, who went on to defeat Democrat John
Motsinger Sr. in the general election.

6. Former Louisiana Rep. Vance McAllister

During his 2013 campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives, Louisiana Republican Vance McAllister was fond of the
phrase, “faith, family and country.” McAllister was elected on an
anti-gay marriage/anti-abortion platform. But McAllister’s commitment to
“traditional marriage” was called into question when, in 2014, a video
from a security camera showed he was theadvocate.com/news/police/8873281-64/james-gill-mcallister.
In the video, McAllister was passionately kissing his scheduler,
Melissa Hixon Peacock, who was married to long-time friend and campaign
donor Heath Peacock and had a son with him. McAllister issued an
official statement saying he had “fallen short” and was “asking for
forgiveness from God, my wife, my kids,” but Heath Peacock told CNN that
McAllister’s man-of-faith routine was politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/08/husband-on-kissing- and that he was “about the most non-religious person I know.”

7. Former Tennessee State Sen. Paul Stanley

Republican Paul Stanley was not shy about pandering to the Christian Right during
his years in Tennessee politics. Stanley was stridently anti-gay, once
sponsoring a bill that would have banned same-sex couples from adopting
children in the state (the bill was defeated). Stanley opposed funding
for Planned Parenthood not only because he was anti-abortion, but also
because he believed Planned Parenthood promoted sinful premarital sex.
Stanley also opposed adultery—or so he said. In 2009, it was revealed
that Stanley (who was 47 years old and married with two children) was www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/28/paul-stanley-tennessee-st_
with a 22-year-old intern named McKensie Morrison. When Morrison’s
boyfriend, Joel Watts, tried to blackmail Stanley with some sexually
explicit pictures documenting the affair, Stanley went public and
resigned from the Tennessee State Senate (Watts pled guilty to blackmail
and was sentenced to one year of probation). But that wasn’t the end of
Stanley’s involvement in "www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/15915801/paul-stanley-recalls-s; he went on to become political editor of the Christian Post.

8.Author/radio host Laura Schlessinger

During her long career in talk radio, Dr. Laura has been a strident,
in-your-face moralist. The Brooklyn native has been consistently
anti-gay (she infamously claimed that “a huge portion of the male
homosexual populace is predatory on young boys”) and has spent many
years preaching against abortion, porn, sex education and any type of
sex outside of marriage. Schlessinger opposes interfaith marriages
(which she calls “interfaithless”), and has argued that married couples
that opt not to have children are selfish and hedonistic. But an
examination of Schlessinger’s own history demonstrates that she hasn’t
always practiced what she preaches. In the mid-1970s, Schlessinger posed
for some www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2004/oct/14/dr-lauras-tell-all-l
taken by the late shock jock Bill Ballance, and in the late 1990s, the
photos appeared on the Internet after Balance sold them to an adult
website.

9. North Dakota State Rep. Randy Boehning

Despite the fact that same-sex marriage is now legal in most parts of the U.S.,
many Republicans still use homophobia to rally their fundamentalist
base. In North Dakota, one such Republican is State Rep. Randy Boehning,
who has been a strong supporter of that state’s ban on same-sex
marriage and has opposed laws that forbid discrimination against gays.
But Boehning’s hypocrisy came to light in April, when the North Dakota Forum reported that he had sent a www.rightwingwatch.org/content/anti-gay-gop-lawmaker-outed-a;amp;utm_source=BOTB&amp;utm_campaign=rightwingwatch of himself to a Bismarck man, Dustin Smith, via the gay dating smartphone app Grindr. Smith went to the Forum after learning about Boehning's www.inforum.com/news/3732441-fargo-lawmaker-sent-explicit-ph and Boehning came out as bisexual.

10. Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh has spent much of his career painting himself as a paragon of
virtue and morality. He was a strong supporter of the war on drugs in
the 1990s, arguing that Americans with substance abuse problems were
reprobates who deserved long prison sentences, In 2003, however, it was
revealed that he had a severe addiction to OxyContin and would be going
to rehab. But then, Limbaugh has always been full of contradictions. He
applauds the Christian Right and condemned Clinton for committing
adultery, yet he has been through two divorces, often uses off-color
humor and sexual innuendos on his show, and was detained at a Florida
airport in 2006 for having a bottle of Viagra that was not in his name.
Then there was Limbaugh’s hateful attack on law student Sandra Fluke in
2012: When Fluke said that health insurance plans should cover female
contraception, Limbaugh calld her a “prostitute” and a “slut” and argued
that if taxpayers were going to pay Fluke to have sex, she should film
the act and make an adult video for his viewing pleasure. Leave it to
Limbaugh to exploit sex while pandering to the Christian Right’s hatred
and fear of it.